Mitt Romney speaks during an appearance in Des Moines last month. (Getty Images)

(Newser)
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Mitt Romney's aides' attempt to erase the electronic records from his time as Massachusetts governor cost the state's taxpayers nearly $100,000, Reuters finds. As Romney prepared to launch his first presidential bid in 2007, his staff bought the hard drives of their state-issued computers, wiped emails from state servers, and signed a lease for new computers for the governor's office, breaking an earlier lease and costing the state $97,000.

Romney representatives say the governor followed the law and precedent, although the former director of administration for the governor's office says his efforts to wipe out records were unprecedented in her 23 years of serving successive governors. Massachusetts officials say state law on releasing records has not been updated to deal with digital records. They are now reviewing requests to release paper records from Romney's governorship, some of which he also sought to destroy before leaving office.

I guess no one told Mitt that Newt paid off some state employees to get the backups.

bewilderbeast

Dec 7, 2011 8:27 AM CST

That he's disgusting goes without saying. But didn't ONE of his "aides" or "officials" think to keep records and blow the whistle on him? Pigs are terrible, but people who protect the pigs, enable them and cover up for them are just as bad.

Watching4theMODS

Dec 6, 2011 6:37 PM CST

Another Repub hiding something like GWB who brought us "The Great Recession" Senate and House investigations discovered that the Bush administration apparently purged millions of emails and that dozens of administration officials used email accounts maintained by the Republican National Committee to conduct official White House business in what appeared to be a violation of the Presidential Records Act. .................................................. "The email controversy first surfaced in January 2006 when Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor appointed to investigate the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, said in a court filing following the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney’s former Chief of Staff I. Lewis Scooter Libby that he "learned that not all email of the Office of the Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system."................................. "An internal investigation by officials in the Office of Administration concluded that e-mails from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney between Sept. 30, 2003, and Oct. 6, 2003 were lost and unrecoverable." http://blogpublic.lib.msu.edu/index.php/presidency-almost-over-but-president-bus?blog=5